He was a healthy boy, that was a blessing. He played well with the other children in the street, and on the one morning in the week when he went to play-group, the leader commented on his nice disposition. Len started to imagine futures for him, though all the time with the proviso in his mind that of course John Julian would do exactly what he wanted to do when the time came for him to choose. He was an active, open-air child, but Len didn’t want him to be a professional athlete. It was too short and too limiting a life. But he’d be a very good amateur. Len always said when the Olympic Games were on that it was a pity the facilities weren’t used afterwards for a Games for real amateurs. Perhaps by the time John Julian was a young man they would be, and he would compete — maybe as a middle-distance runner, or perhaps a pole-vaulter.
His real work would surely be something where he could use his brain. There was no disputing that he had one, he was so forward. Len didn’t fancy his becoming a doctor, as so many parents hoped for their children, and certainly he didn’t want a surgeon son. Still, he would like something that involved a degree of prestige. He finally settled on Oxford and a science degree, with a fellowship to follow, and a succession of brilliant research projects.
But that was what he hoped for. The boy’s future was for him to decide, though he knew John Julian would want to talk it through with both his parents before he made his decision.
Meanwhile there was a real highlight in his life coming up: his first day at school. Marian had agreed — the Marian in his mind had agreed — that he should take him on his first day. She would be taking him day in, day out after that, she said: that would be her pleasure. It was only right that Len should have the joy of the first day. One of the firm’s confectionary factories was near Scarborough, and Len usually visited it once a year. He arranged to go in early September — Tuesday the fourth, the day that school started for five-year-olds in his area. He booked a good hotel in the upper part of the town, near where Anne Bronte had died, and he went off with a head brimming with happy anticipation.
He got through the inspection and consultations well enough. He had had to train himself over the past five years not to be abstracted, not to give only half his attention to matters of that kind: after all, it would never do for John Julian’s father to be out of a job. When he was asked by one of the local managers to dinner with him and his wife that evening, Len said with every appearance of genuine regret that unfortunately he was engaged to visit “a relative of the wife’s.” In fact, when the day’s work was done, he went back to the hotel, then took the funicular railway down to the sands. In a rapturous walk along the great stretch of beach he imagined what his day would have been.
John Julian was excited, of course. Immensely excited. He had dressed himself and was down to breakfast by half past seven, and when his mother and father smiled at his enthusiasm he said that he had to pack his schoolbag, though in fact he had done it the night before, and packed and unpacked it for days before that. When they set out from the front door Leonard was immensely touched when John Julian reached up and took his hand, conscious that he needed guidance and protection at this great moment of his life. At the gate he turned to wave to Mummy at the door, then took Len’s hand again for the ten minutes’ walk to school, sometimes shouting to friends of his own age who were also with their parents on their first day of school. At the school gate John Julian looked up at his father to say as clearly as if he’d used words: “You will come in as you promised, won’t you?” So Len went in, as most of the parents did, knowing the new children’s classroom from the introductory tour the week before. Soon the children were mingling, playing, and discovering their new world, and the parents, with conspiratorial glances at each other, could slip away. The wind buffeted Len’s face as he walked back to the funicular and thought what a wrench it was to leave him, and what a happiness to walk home with some of the other parents, talking parents’ talk, swapping tales of achievements and setbacks, hopes and prospects.
Back in the hotel room, Len imagined his day, going over things with Marian, wondering what John Julian was doing, speculating whether he was getting on well with his teacher (“She seemed such a nice woman”). As with most parents, such speculation was endless and self-feeding, and Len decided to save the fetching of his son from school as a delicious treat for next day.
His work at the factory, his talk in the canteen, was despatched with his usual efficiency. By late afternoon he was on the train to York, and then on the Inter-City Peterborough, gazing sightlessly at the rolling English countryside. His son had run into his arms at the school gates, almost incoherent in his anxiety to tell his father everything about his day. Len had sat him on the wall of the playground to give him a few minutes to get his breath and tell him all the most vital points. Then they had walked home hand in hand, John Julian still chattering nineteen to the dozen as he retrieved from his memory more facts and encounters of vital interest in his young life. Marian was waiting at the door and the whole thing was to do again — all the day’s events recounted, all the jumble of impressions and opinions rolled out again for her.
Marian in fact was not at home when he got in. She was still at her night-school class in nineteenth-century history. Len made himself a sandwich, poured a glass of milk, and sat by the kitchen table gazing out at the twilit garden, smiling to himself as he went through the excitements and joys of his day. He did not hear his wife let herself in through the front door. He did not realize she stood for some moments watching him as he sat there smiling contentedly. He was conscious only of a movement behind him as she snatched the breadknife from the table, and very conscious of pain as the knife went into his back.
Later, in the police station, her face raddled with tears of grief and guilt, Marian could only sob out over and over: “I knew he’d found another woman. I’d known it for months. He was so happy!”
The Iron Angel
by Edward D. Hoch
With so many changes taking place in Eastern Europe, the adventures of Michael Vlado carry a special interest, for the author has carefully researched the changing social environment, particularly in post-Ceausescu Romania, and how the Gypsy tribes are being affected. This episode finds Vlado in search of a mysterious, three-eyed statue that appears to be the key to a murder investigation...
Michael Vlado’s Gypsy village in the foothills of the Carpathians had remained free, so far, of the turmoil that had swept through much of Romania since the collapse of the Socialist government. In many communities Gypsies had died, or been driven away, and Michael had intensified efforts to find a new home for his people. But as spring returned to the Carpathians all seemed well for a time.
Even Michael’s old friend Segar, once a captain in the government militia and now an official of the transition government, had taken to driving up to the village of Gravita as he had done so often in the old days. That was why Michael saw nothing unusual in his arrival that April morning when the horses were out in the field and the first of the spring flowers had blossomed.
“Good morning, Captain. A nice day for a ride in the hills!”
Segar smiled. Though he no longer wore his old uniform, he still liked being addressed as Captain. “My visit is not entirely one of pleasure,” he admitted. “Do you remember an American girl named Jennifer Beatty? She rode up here on a motorcycle and stayed a few days.”